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After a week Oliver relented, preferring to share a bed with his brothers than sleep on the newly seasoned planks in one of the lofts. But he kept his job at the sawmill. A year or so later he started courting, but when his girl-friend came to call for him one day, Burton, in his forty-seventh year, took a fancy to her. She appears to have fallen for him, being a loose and saucy Radford tart, and the iron peace of the family was shattered. Burton went off with her for a few days to some place in Derbyshire. Oliver, who had been in love with the girl and was now in despair at everyone's perfidy, enlisted with the army as a blacksmith, for the Great War had begun.

So at forty-eight years of age Burton received news of his eldest son, and accounts differ as to how it came. One says that a white-faced twelve-year-old daughter went to the forge with the black tidings. How did he take it? He was shoeing a horse and, stunned by her own emptiness after the words of the telegram, she was afraid to interrupt his work, imagining it was more important to them and the world than what she had been fetched out of school to tell.

Her mother was at home, crying one minute, stunned and silent the next, clinging to the flickering light of disbelief whenever she had the strength—while blinds at the house had already been drawn.

Burton had seen her, and wondered why she was out of school, for he had insisted that none of his children should miss a minute of it. She couldn't tell whether he scowled especially at her, or whether he was niggled by the horse unable to hold still, an animal that could sense before any of them the awful news in the air.

He hammered in the last four nails of the shoe, and even then she did not dare shout what she had come to tell, because three or four other people were standing around. She had thought on her way there to go up and whisper it, but was more afraid of that than doing it any other way. When the horse was pushed unwillingly backwards between the cart-shafts she called out: ‘Oliver's dead, our dad.'

‘What did you say?'

He stopped in picking up his tools, but heard the first time, and his question was only a means of keeping himself steady, and the preparation for him to stand bolt-still for a few seconds in the silence created by the information among the men waiting around, and for him to say in a sharp voice that astonished them all, and made them realize how terrible the by now not unusual news would be: ‘I bloody well knew it!'

Oliver had not been killed at the Battle of the Aisne, or in the senseless slaughter at Loos, but on a moor in Norfolk. Some of his boisterous soldier-mates had, by way of a joke, fed rum to a string of mules he was to lead across the moor at dusk. Enlivened too much, they kicked him to death, and he wasn't found till the middle of the following day.

Another account, and probably the right one, says that he and his pals were taking a drink outside a pub near Hungerford in Berkshire. One soldier dared a maid to feed whisky to one of their horses and, being gentle and persuasive, she managed to do it.

The animal ran wild, galloping around the yard with such energy that it seemed they would never get it back to barracks. Oliver tried some tackling, and was killed by a blow at the head from one of its hooves. The horse had to be shot, and the girl who had given it whisky got into great trouble for her mindless action.

All nine of the Burtons were sitting at Sunday dinner, a large joint of meat about to be carved. A knock sounded at the door, and Mary-Ann came back with a telegram saying that Oliver had been killed.

His body, clothed as the soldier he had been, was brought to them in a coffin which lay open for a day in the living-room. The children stood around, though some of the girls dared not at first come down from the bedroom to look. Burton made them, and gave orders that none of them was to cry. ‘Anybody starts blubbering,' he said, the bones standing out from his unnaturally white face, ‘and I'll kick 'em from arse-hole to breakfast time. There'll be no bleddy blawting in this family.'

He made such impossible demands, sometimes only to hear the sound of his own voice, and when they objected he was then committed to getting obedience, even though it might not matter to him whether he was obeyed or not. If only they had let him speak, and not cringed before every word, he might have had something to thank them for.

And they tried not to cry as they surrounded Oliver's coffin and looked at his twenty-two-year-old face. He was that rare youth who was liked by all his sisters, as well as loved by them. In spite of everything, he was also Burton's favourite son, and Burton knew he'd never been liked by him, though Burton had thought that one day Oliver would make as good a blacksmith as himself.

There was a strange, chemical smell in the room. Two neighbours had come quietly in, and now the door burst open, and Florrie Voce from next door pushed through them and looked into the coffin. Her round flat Radford face suddenly bunched like a withered apple. ‘What the bloody hell does
she
want?' Burton thought, and from her came a loud screaming of agonized distress which filled the whole house as if to split all the walls.

The effect was to tear into the children's hearts so directly that they too began to weep and wail, as if Oliver was finally getting his rightful dues. Mary-Ann resumed the quiet sobbing that had stricken her ever since hearing the news, and finally Burton himself—as they all witnessed—‘cried like a baby', his soul torn out of him at last.

The coffin was taken to Lenton cemetery on a gun-carriage, where Oliver was buried with full military honours to the tune of the Last Post.

When he could bear to talk about it Burton said to Mary-Ann that if he'd been with Oliver on that day, the bloody horse wouldn't have kicked him to death. He had a few tricks by which to tame it or keep it off. He slept with the vision of saving his son from all harm at its vicious antics, only to wake up in the morning and face the further reality of his death. He was eventually buried next to him in the same churchyard.

As a child I used to go with my aunts to put flowers on Oliver's grave. They did so every week, even twenty or thirty years after he had died. The last time Burton went out of the house as an old man of nearly eighty, before his first and last illness which brought on death too suddenly for him to beat it or have much say in the matter, was to visit Oliver's grave and set flowers by it. Unlike his wife and daughters he would never put them in a vase of water, but merely lay them on the grave itself, stay a moment or two, grunt, and walk away.

Burton did not believe in God, but his family, at both times equally grief-stricken, said that God had got back at him twice. Once when He took his son, and again when He put out his eye.

16

I knew an extremely kind person who believed that everything people said to him was the truth, simply because it pained him to hear it. Such nobility of spirit could not exist for long. He suffered too much at hearing so many sad stories. I think everyone must have met him, and spilled their troubles. His sensibility was legendary, but for him it was a permanent wound. His receptive and unselective spirit continually bled. He was a real man, being full of sympathy, and because of this people would not leave him alone, but continually kept at him with their plans and complaints.

By liking others and respecting their suffering, he did not hate himself. He considered it infantile to hate oneself, to analyse motives, take oneself to pieces with dislike and hold one's nostrils at the smell. It would mean splitting himself in two, and the part which did the splitting had no real interest in it except self-hatred which, like self-love, is a flame that shrivels you up.

He was tempted, however, to let that other part of himself take him to pieces and tell him the truth. I suspected all the time that he had let it do this to him anyway, and that the experiment had failed. At least he hadn't got what he expected. But he insisted he had kicked that other self out quite early on, and had no more truck with it. I am one person only, he said, not two. I am myself alone and myself only with me, and no other self can be allowed to come on me at this hour. The more you know, especially about yourself, the sooner you grow old.

So he gave himself up to the benefit of other people who, he felt, were less fortunate than he. But if I had been he, which I am not and never could be, he would have laid barbed-wire around his house, bought a gun and shot them down as they came at his defences with wirecutters and implements for tunnelling. If he had believed in self-preservation he would have filled their ears with his sufferings instead. But he secretly hoped, in his blind pride, to defeat them by endless patience and pity, to go on listening all his life, to bleed them white of the red complaining blood of their speech and change them into ghosts so that he could be free of them at last, and turn himself into a saint.

One morning, just before dawn—he lived alone—he lit the gas to make coffee after spending all night trying to get to sleep—thinking about the numerous years of listening he had done. When the water boiled he turned off the gas and filled the coffee pot. With the usual care he poured a cupful, put in milk, then sugar. He was still listening to the voices, hoping even at this late hour to get something from them.

His friends did not need to be near him any more for him to listen to them speaking their truths. And when they had nothing to say he went on making it up himself, on and on, in their voices, the nonsensical truths they continually talked, and which at last, considering the action he had in mind, were beginning to make sense.

He saw now that the world was full of truth. Everything was the truth. Every word spoken anywhere and everywhere was the truth. He should have been a priest listening to confession in order to find out that the truth was not the truth, that the truth in fact did not exist, no matter how much you worried it, or grieved about it. But it was too late. While the coffee in his cup still steamed, he turned on the taps again and lay down on the floor.

He was a writer, but the more people talked to him, and confessed to him, and complained to him, the less he would write. He felt that every sentence from them took a week off his life, and he was right, for the more he received the stab of their sentences, the more he was driven to take his own life, because he could not think of one sentence to save himself that he had not already heard from somebody else.

17

Burton was working in the blacksmith's shop at the pit one day when a piece of burning steel flew into his eye. He staggered back and put a hand to the wound. Then he dabbed at it and went on working.

At the end of the shift he walked out as if nothing had happened. He did not go to the doctor, and neither did he claim compensation—which he could have done. He went blind in that eye, and took the piece of steel in it to the grave with him.

He lived many of his days in the thirty years that followed in appalling pain, which almost certainly accounted for much of his harshness and short temper in the latter part of his life, by which time he might otherwise have mellowed a little.

He was no iron man, and felt pain with the same intensity as anybody else. He was also no hero, for if he had been he might have kept a stiff upper lip and been as light-hearted as the rest of his family wanted him to be. Or he would have said nothing unmerciful and allowed them to live as peacefully as they would have liked. But he believed in spreading his suffering, and putting up with it by making others suffer. Whether they liked it or not, they had to share it with him. At the same time they were never allowed to mention the cause of it, in return for which they did not hear it from his own lips either.

He'd sit in a darkened room when he could bear the affliction no longer, a bottle of whisky at his side, and even when he was over seventy I remember being told not to go into the parlour because he wanted to be by himself.

His family said he was not capable of love, that he had never loved anyone and never would, though to me he seemed tender to his wife, and calm enough when I knew him and they were elderly. Going out together he made Mary-Ann walk some paces behind, and this caused much comment, though he never altered in his habit. At the same time he could not live without her—or let her out of his sight. When she went on a week's visit to her family at St Neots he followed her down after two days, leaving the children (some of whom were grown up) to fend for themselves.

In the prime of their married life he gave her as little money as possible to keep all ten. When they lived at Bridge Yard (a house on Wollaton Road between the school and a coal-loading wharf on the canal), she took in washing to try and make ends meet. Her complaints made no difference to Burton, who seemed impenetrable, and couldn't even understand he was being unkind. She needed money for the house, but he had to have cash for beer, without which he could neither work nor live. Burton was opaque and unjust, but he was a poor man all his life, and though he worked at a skilled trade, he was always on the edge of poverty. He made horseshoes of great beauty and ability and no doubt sold them dirt cheap, even for that time. Only in his late fifties did existence become easier—though not much, for times never stop being hard for the working man. In the thirties where were four other wage-earners in the family, so that the house seemed reasonably well off to me.

But when his children were young they said he took more care at feeding his half-dozen pigs than he did over them. People who came to the house with buckets of slops and baskets of crusts would get a penny or two from Burton, who would tell one of his children to carry them to the sty. On the way there he or she would search for bits still fit to eat, but Burton never knew this, otherwise they would have got a good kick for daring to rob their own father. And nobody would tell him to his face that they were hungry.

He worked unbelievably hard. Blacksmithery was a trade that demanded it, in which it was said that some smiths occasionally went blind from the spirit-breaking labour of their toil. Yet for all that, Burton appeared a sensitive man to me. Perhaps as a child, and a grandchild at that, I was able to get through to a part of him that he could never open to his own children or even to himself. His one good eye, extraordinarily alive, missed nothing. His mouth was permanently ironic, turning down at each end but as if it didn't really want to. Wicked lips, when closed, were ready to play any trick, or to let one be done.